The Crimson God-Eater

The air on Sanctum VI was thick with the cloying stench of brimstone and a hundred million nightmares made manifest. Shrine cities, once gleaming alabaster testaments to the God-Emperor's glory, now burned under a sickly, Warp-tainted sky, their hallowed ground churned into mud by the trampling hooves and clawed feet of the Ruinous Powers' legions.

Inquisitor Valeria Kaelen of the Ordo Malleus knelt behind a shattered aquila statue, bolter spitting righteous fury at a pack of snarling Flesh Hounds. Beside her, the stoic forms of the Grey Knights moved with grim precision, their Nemesis force weapons carving swathes through the daemonic tide. Brother-Captain Valerius, his Terminator armour pitted but unyielding, parried a Hellblade thrust from a towering Daemon Prince of Tzeentch, psychic energy crackling around his blade.

"Their numbers are relentless, Inquisitor," Valerius voxed, his voice calm despite the maelstrom. "The rift above the High Basilica is widening. We cannot hold this sector much longer without reinforcements."

Valeria gritted her teeth. Reinforcements were a prayer whispered into the void. Every available soul on the planet was already committed, dying to buy precious minutes for the civilian evacuations — evacuations that were likely already doomed.

Just as a cohort of shrieking Daemonettes surged forward, threatening to engulf their position, the impossible happened.

The very fabric of reality seemed to seize. The cacophony of battle — the roars of daemons, the bark of bolters, the screams of the dying — was muffled, replaced by a sibilant, hungry whisper that seemed to originate from everywhere and nowhere.

Above the struggling Daemon Prince, the air didn't merely shimmer — it bled. A rent, not a tear into the Warp, but a wound in reality itself, opened. It wasn't the chaotic maw of a daemon gate, but something else entirely — impossibly deep, impossibly crimson, edged with a chilling un-light.

And from this wound stepped a figure.

He was tall, lean, clad in robes the colour of spilt blood, ancient and flowing, defying the raging winds of the daemon world. His form was subtly wrong, possessed of an unnerving stillness, yet carrying an aura of immense, predatory power. His features were sharp, almost elegant, but his eyes... his eyes gleamed with a crimson light that seemed to hold the cold depths of dead stars and the burning hunger of an eternal predator.

The Daemon Prince, momentarily distracted by this unnatural arrival, shrieked a challenge, its bird-like head cocked, feathers ruffled with indignation. It charged, its blade wreathed in Warpfire, a being of pure, unfettered Tzeentchian energy seeking to annihilate the intrusion.

The figure — Alucard — moved. But it wasn't combat. It was consumption.

He didn't raise a weapon. He didn't unleash psychic force or arcane energy familiar to Kaelen or the Grey Knights. Instead, the crimson void around him expanded. It wasn't violent or explosive; it was like a deep, cosmic inhalation. The air grew colder, the Warp-stench momentarily receding.

The Daemon Prince's shriek turned into a sound of ultimate dissolution. Its form, solid yet composed of shifting energies, wavered. The crimson void seemed to latch onto it, drawing its essence, its power, its very being into that impossibly deep hunger. There was no resistance — not truly. The Daemon Prince was not defeated; it was drawn inward. Its form collapsed into the crimson void, Warpfire sputtered and died, and then it was gone — not banished, but vanished into a space that defied psychic tracing. Even the lingering Warp resonance was absent, as if its essence had been consumed by something deeper than the Immaterium itself.

The battle froze. Not just the Imperials. The daemons — from the lowest Horrors to the greater entities struggling elsewhere on the battlefield — recoiled. A wave of primal terror, entirely distinct from the fear they inflicted, rippled through their ranks. They didn't just stop fighting; they flinched, their malevolent presences shrinking, some even turning tail and attempting to flee back toward the unstable rift.

Inquisitor Kaelen stared, her bolter lowered, her mind reeling. She had witnessed countless horrors, faced down entities that would shatter lesser minds. But this... this was outside every xenos threat assessment, every daemonological text, every forbidden tome she had ever consulted.

This being didn't fight daemons; it ate them. It consumed the very stuff of the Warp, devoured entities that were supposed to be eternal. The sheer, blasphemous violation of the natural — and unnatural — order was staggering.

"By the Emperor's name..." she whispered, the words catching in her throat. She felt a cold dread settle deeper than any daemon's influence. This was not a saviour. This was an entity of profound, terrifying power, operating by rules the Imperium could not comprehend and dared not countenance. A being that could unmake a Greater Daemon with a breath, and whose nature was utterly alien.

"The Crimson... God-Eater," she murmured, the label solidifying in her mind, a black mark in the annals of unknown threats.

Behind their helms, the Grey Knights were silent, their psychic senses overloaded by the sheer anomaly they had just witnessed. Brother-Captain Valerius felt the raw horror emanating from the Inquisitor, the ingrained Imperial absolute refusal to accept such power. Yet his experienced eyes saw something else.

He saw the daemons fleeing. He saw the immediate, tactical advantage. This entity was a disruptor, a force that terrified the very beings they were fighting.

"Inquisitor," Valerius voxed, his tone measured. "Observe. The daemonic advance has faltered. Many are retreating from his presence."

Kaelen tore her gaze from the spot where the Daemon Prince had been.

"He devoured a creature of the Warp! He is an abomination! A threat greater than the daemons themselves!"

"Perhaps," Valerius conceded, his Nemesis sword humming as he prepared for the daemons' inevitable return. "But he is also a force the daemons dread. We do not understand him. His power is unlike any Warp manifestation we have encountered. Immediate engagement would be folly." He paused, considering. "He does not appear to be aligned with the Ruinous Powers. He predates them, perhaps? We must focus on the incursion first. Any action against him must be postponed. Containment, not destruction, until his nature and purpose can be ascertained."

His words were advice, but carried the weight of Grey Knight strategic doctrine — analyse the anomaly, exploit weaknesses, control the unknown when possible.

Further down the embattled lines, amongst the few surviving Adeptus Custodes who guarded the planet's ultimate shrine — a silent, golden presence amidst the horror — there was no panic.

Tribune Aethelian, a giant in gold armour, his guardian spear held ready, watched Alucard with ancient, unwavering eyes.

He did not fear. He did not condemn. He simply observed.

To the Custodians — sworn protectors who remembered the Emperor's long view and the myriad terrifying forms reality could take — Alucard was not necessarily a daemon, nor a xenos, nor a mortal.

He was an event. An entity.

His capacity to devour Warp-stuff was unsettling, yes, but Aethelian felt a deep, quiet instinct — a whisper from the soul-bond with the Master of Mankind — that this entity, while perilous, might serve a purpose beyond the immediate comprehension of lesser souls.

A higher design, perhaps, playing out on a cosmic scale that dwarfed the current battlefield.

They would watch. They would wait.

And if this Crimson God-Eater proved a threat to the Throneworld or the Emperor's designs, the Golden Host would act — but not out of blind dogma — out of calculated, terrible necessity.

Alucard lingered for only a few more heartbeats, his crimson eyes seeming to sweep across the battlefield, acknowledging the terrified flight of the daemons, the horrified awe of the Imperials, the quiet scrutiny of the Custodes.

He offered no sign, no gesture, no word.

Then, with the same impossible lack of fanfare as his arrival, the crimson wound in reality snapped shut — and he was gone.

The whisper faded. The Warp-stench returned. The daemons, their initial terror receding slightly, began to regroup, their unnatural courage bolstered by numbers.

> "Valerius is right," Kaelen said, forcing her mind back to the immediate threat, though the image of the Daemon Prince being consumed was seared into her memory. "We continue the fight. But report this. To the High Lords, to the Inquisition at large, to Titan. Detail everything. Include the Custodes' observation, though their motives remain their own."

She raised her bolter again, the taste of ash and fear in her mouth. "And record the designation. This entity, this… is to be known from this day forth as 'The Crimson God-Eater'."

The sound of bolter fire and daemon shrieks resumed, but the battle on Sanctum VI had fundamentally changed.

A new, terrifying variable had entered the equation of galactic survival — an unknown entity that devoured the very nightmares the Imperium fought, and whose true allegiance and purpose remained a chilling mystery.

"Far across the Immaterium, amidst the shifting halls of the Crystal Labyrinth, a flicker passed across the mind of Tzeentch… a flicker of curiosity — and dread."